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Eclipse impressions

I have previously espoused opinions about IDEs. But, I’ve heard great things about Eclipse, including this rather direct statement from a developer who I respect:

Having a solid IDE like IntelliJ or Eclipse so radically improves your productivity that I quite simply don’t see how you can call yourself a professional developer without using one.

So, I thought I’d give Eclipse a try. Again. The latest version is Eclipse 3.1. This time I wasn’t going to try to get by with just the free tutorials. I did some browsing on Amazon and found Eclipse Distilled. This book, while aimed at Eclipse 3.0, is eminently readable and quite informative on the Eclipse way of doing things. All the views and perspectives and projects and jargon can be a bit confusing, so I was happy to pay $35 for this guide.

After using Eclipse for a few weeks, I have some likes and dislikes:

Likes:

  • Code completion: huge. Hitting control-space and choosing a method rather than having to remember exactly what it is named is big. (Charles Petzold talks about a similar feature called IntelliSense in Visual Studio and some of the ramifications. Not sure if all of them apply to Eclipse.)
  • Integration with existing projects: while you can easily start new projects with Eclipse, I was also very impressed with how easy it was to bring an existing codebase into the system and begin using Eclipse to modify it.
  • Refactoring: again, huge. I find that I use the ‘rename method’ refactoring most often. The ability to just change the name of a method in one place and have it propagate allows you much more flexibility.

Dislikes:

  • Using CVS externally confuses Eclipse: I consider myself a power user of CVS. This means it’s often easier for me to drop down and run commands from the prompt. This seems to confuse Eclipse, especially when I’m adding files.
  • No support for local CVS repositories: it’s a known bug, with some workarounds available.
  • Memory usage: 150M of memory is used, even when it is doing nothing. Now, I realize that most new boxes are shipped with gigs and gigs of memory, if you run Eclipse inside VMware with Oracle and Tomcat, eventually things start to get a bit crowded.
  • I have a few other quibbles, but above are the main ones I’ve run into so far.

So, ok, ok. I was wrong. Those of you who have used Eclipse or NetBeans or VisualStudio or IntelliJ or Visual SlickEdit are snoozing right now, but I’ve learned something important. IDEs can be very good and when a free cross platform IDE is available and paired with an external build tool, the results can be powerful indeed.

“Eclipse Distilled” at Amazon.

[tags]eclipse,IDE[/tags]

IDEs Java | moore |

JSVC and large log files

jsvc, which is used for daemoning Tomcat and other java applications on unix, takes filenames for stdout and stderr as arguments. One thing to be aware of is that when the either of these files reach a size of just over 2 gigabytes, jsvc simply fails. No error message. If you restart the application, it will note that it can’t write to the file and proceeds to write to the console. I saw this behavior using tomcat 5 on fedora core 4 with jsvc 1.0.1 (described here).

I am not sure exactly what the problem is, but when I started tomcat via the normal shell script, it was able to write to that file. The user that jsvc runs as had no limits on file size:

-bash-3.00$ ulimit -a
core file size          (blocks, -c) 0
data seg size           (kbytes, -d) unlimited
file size               (blocks, -f) unlimited
pending signals                 (-i) 1024
max locked memory       (kbytes, -l) 32
max memory size         (kbytes, -m) unlimited
open files                      (-n) 1024
pipe size            (512 bytes, -p) 8
POSIX message queues     (bytes, -q) 819200
stack size              (kbytes, -s) 10240
cpu time               (seconds, -t) unlimited
max user processes              (-u) 32764
virtual memory          (kbytes, -v) unlimited
file locks                      (-x) unlimited

Therefore, it might be an issue with jsvc. Do note that there are nightly snapshots of jsvc, which might solve the issue. The solution I found is to use the copytruncate option of logrotate.

Programming Tomcat | moore |

The Eolas Matter, or How IE is Going to Change ‘Real Soon Now’

Do you use <object> functionality in your web application? Do you support Microsoft Internet Explorer?

If so, you might want to take a look at this: Microsoft’s Active X D-Day, which details Microsoft’s plans to change IE to deal with the Eolas lawsuit. Apparently the update won’t be critical, but eventually will be rolled into every version of IE.

Here’s a bit more technical explanation of what how to fix object embedding from Microsoft, and a bit of history from 2003.

Via Mezzoblue.

Technology | moore |

Code behaving badly

You know what, coding is hard. You’re balancing shifting requirements, a constant stream of new technologies and a hot cup of coffee, all while trying to keep up with your flood of email. When you actually get a minute to code, you sometimes don’t know where to start. Testing is important, but often gets shoved to the bottom of the priority list. This makes for some … interesting code. I love having my code reviewed, but it’s always a humbling experience.

That’s why The Daily WTF resonates with me. You know what? I’m self taught, so I probably have written code that bad. I just hope it wasn’t code someone paid me for. But even in my professional life, I’m sure I’ve written code that caused someone maintaining it later to yell ‘WTF’. Never Vector Oriented Programming, but I have been accused of using HashMap Oriented Programming.

Apart from mistakes anyone beginning could make, there are also folks (we’ve all met them) who just shouldn’t be coding. That’s where this site truly shines: gobs of examples. The Brillant Paula is one great one, among others.

This site is humbling and astonishing. It reminds me of the old chestnut: if your computer was a car; software ‘engineering’ has a long way to go before it truly becomes engineering.

Programming | moore |

A survey of geocoding options

I wrote a while back about building your own geocoding engine. The Tiger/Line dataset has some flaws as a geocoding service, most notably that once you get out of urban areas many addresses simply cannot be geocoded.

Recently, I was sent a presentation outlining other options (pdf) which seems to be a great place to start an evaluation. The focus is on Lousiana–I’m not sure how the conclusions would apply to other states’ data.

Technology | moore |

Full content feeds and Yahoo ads

I changed the Movable Type template to include full content on feeds. Sorry for the disruption (it may have made the last fifteen entries appear new).

I think sending full content in the feeds (both RSS1 and RSS2) goes nicely with the Yahoo Ads I added a few months ago. Folks who actually subscribe to what I say shouldn’t have to endure ads, while those who find the entries via a search engine can endure some advertising. (Russell Beattie had a much slicker implementation of this idea a few years ago.)

More about the ads: I think that they’re not great, but I think that’s due to my relative lack of traffic–because of the low number of pageviews, Yahoo just doesn’t (can’t) deliver ads that are very targeted. (I’ve seen a lot of ‘Find Dan Moore’). It’s also a beta service (ha, ha). Oh well–it has paid me enough to go to lunch (but I’ll have to wait because they mail a check only when you hit $100).

As long as we’re doing public service announcements, I’ve decided to turn off comments (from the initial post, rather than only on the old ones). Maybe it’s because I’m posting to thin air, or because I’m not posting on inflammatory topics, or because comment spam is so prevalent, but I’m not getting any comments anymore (I think 5 in the last 6 months). So, no more comments.

And that’s the last blog about this blog you’ll see, hopefully for another year.

Technology | moore |